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Enemy Character Design Run The enemies in my level are going to be members of the seventh cavalry and as such they are going to be riding horses. The difficult part of this character is the horse so I created the horse on its own and then added the person on afterwards. I created the running animation before creating an idle since I found better references for running horses. There were two references that I found particularly helpful.

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Enemy Character DesignRun

The enemies in my level are going to be members of the seventh cavalry and as such they are going to be riding horses. The difficult part of this character is the horse so I created the horse on its own and then added the person on afterwards. I created the running animation before creating an idle since I found better references for running horses. There were two references that I found particularly helpful.

In my first few attempts at creating the horse animation I struggle with the leg positions and found that the animations I produced did not look very smooth. Using these references I was able to create capture the motion of a galloping horse quite well.

My first step was to create a rough silhouette of the horse to use as the base for each frame.

The shape of the horse is not quite right – its too jagged in some places and too flat in others – but from here I could remove some of the excess from the shape and then apply very basic shading. I adjusted the position of the front left leg, removed weight from the neck and underbelly.

The next iteration applied more detailed shading for the front and back legs and added more subtle shading on the neck.

This is the first frame of my animation and for the next 11 frames I would duplicate this frame and then adjust the leg positions and if necessary I would add or remove pixels on the body. One I was satisfied with the shape of the horse I would apply shading.

Once the horse was animated I went back to each frame and added the rider in. It did not take much effort to add the rider in since his body position stays the same for the entirety of the animation. All I had to do was move him a pixel backwards and a pixel upwards in time with the animation to make it look less static.

The design for the rider was provided by Caitlin and I simply adapted it to be side-on

I changed the colour of the characters hair because I realised it blended in to the orange background of my level after importing the character into GameMaker. I also changed some minor details of the character like his boots to make them more recognisable. Rather than the grey marching boots I gave the character cowboy boots with spurs.

Idle

Creation of the idle was very simple. All I had to do was take the first frame from the running animation and position the legs so that they were all on the ground. I added a second frame where the character was a pixel lower to add some motion to the idle.

I would have liked to add the animation that Caitlin used in her original animation but the design for my enemy changed at the last moment and I did not have time to do it. I think the action of stroking the moustache would have made the idle much more interesting and given the enemy some character.

Attack

Enemies in my game will attack by charging the main character on horseback and while it being trampled by a horse is quite deadly I don’t think it will look too good if the horse just runs over the character. To differentiate the attack for the typical movement I will create a new animation, and this animation should also make it more obvious why the attack inflicts damage.

Since the character design is supposed to be General Custer I gave him a cavalry sabre and the attack animation will be him pointing the sabre forwards as he charges.